In an interaction with, WhatsApp Software Engineer Alan Kao and spokesperson Carl Woog highlighted some of the key features of the app’s end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp, government agencies, Facebook, nobody can read or see messages sent on the app.
“If you’re using WhatsApp to avoid government surveillance, stop now,” warned one Twitter user.The feature went live last year, and basically ensures that WhatsApp messages can only be read by the sender, receiver, and not anyone else.
This revelation has concerned privacy campaigners, including Professor Kirstie Ball, co-director and founder of the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy, who told the paper that the vulnerability was “a huge threat” to freedom of speech. It continues: “ WhatsApp published a technical white paper on its encryption design, and has been transparent about the government requests it receives, publishing data about those requests in the Facebook Government Requests Report.” “ The design decision referenced in the Guardian story prevents millions of messages from being lost, and WhatsApp offers people security notifications to alert them to potential security risks.” “ WhatsApp… would fight any government request to create a backdoor,” the statement reads. A spokesperson told Fortune in an email that the design decision exposed by Boelter does not “ give governments a ‘backdoor’ into its systems” and instead “ prevents millions of messages from being lost.” WhatsApp has denied The Guardian‘s claim, calling the story “false”.
“If WhatsApp is asked by a government agency to disclose its messaging records, it can effectively grant access due to the change in keys,” Boelter, who reported the security vulnerability to Facebook in 2016, told The Guardian. (The sender is alerted after the fact if they have opted in to encryption warnings.) The article explains that WhatsApp’s encryption relies on the “generation of unique security keys,” which are traded and verified between users to ensure that communications are secure and cannot be intercepted.īut Facebook (FB), which owns WhatsApp, has the ability to resend undelivered messages with a new security key, effectively allowing the company to access the ‘encrypted’ messages without the sender or recipient being aware or able to prevent it from happening. Tobias Boelter, a cryptography and security researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Guardian that due to the way WhatsApp has implemented its end-to-end encryption protocol, Facebook can intercept and read users’ messages.
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